I have proposed an instructional theory called "Model-Centered Instruction." (See "Model-Centered Instruction" at http://tip.psychology.org.) It distills for designers the operational principle of several new-paradigm instructional products that Peter Fairweather and I reviewed in "Computer-Based Instruction" (In Tobias and Fletcher, Training and Retraining: A Handbook for Business, Industry, Government, and the Military, Macmillan Reference, USA, 2000).
Model-centered instruction is motivated by theoretical and practical considerations:
- Designers find it difficult when a design requires anything other than familiar static tutorial structures, showing how much we unconsciously rely on them as design patterns
- Traditional designs fragment subject-matter structures in order to give priority to certain strategic, message, and media structures, whereas recent experience has shown that the learner can benefit from experience with subject-matter structures themselves in their integral form
- All subject-matters share a natural symmetry and can be described in terms of dynamic system models of three types: environment models, cause-effect system models, and expert performance models
- Experience with the systems in the world around us, or models of them at some level of denaturing, creates a natural instructional language that learners understand and designers can use
- Instruction can be seen as an augmentation to a learner's model experience, which gives the designer a new structural theme for generating designs
A major principle of model-centered instruction is that designers should begin design by identifying key content model structures first. That is, their first attention should be paid to the layer of the design that identifies and partitions content, which is expressed in the form of dynamic models. Attention to structures at other layers of the design is secondary unless project constraints dictate otherwise.
Other publications on model-centered instruction include:
- A monograph chapter "Model-Centered Instruction", published here with permission of the Journal of Structural Learning and Intelligent Systems (Taylor and Francis Publishers).
- A proceedings paper titled "Model-Centered Instruction: The Web and Simulation" (Proceedings of the 16th Annual Conference on Distance Teaching and Learning, 2000, Madison, WI).
- Two technical reports co-authored with Jon Nelson and Bob Richards (1999) for the Idaho National Engineering and Environmental Laboratory titled "Theoretical and Practical Criteria for a System of Pre-Design Analysis" and "Model-Centered Analysis Process (MCAP): A Pre-Design Methodology Based on Theory and Derived Criteria".
Contact me at:
andy_gibbons@byu.edu |
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